


do you need me too? (i believe) it’s gonna feel like new

by shslduelist (joeri)



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS
Genre: Comfort, Feel-good, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-18
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 21:13:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18507202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/joeri/pseuds/shslduelist
Summary: bright as a star - be the light strobing down on me.suddenly i was free.(post-episode 98)





	do you need me too? (i believe) it’s gonna feel like new

Following the duel, Playmaker carried the data back to where they’d dispatched from. It was a tedious process. Data extracted from Mirror Link Vrains needed to pass an inspection. The packet of data material containing each consciousness could only return to the address it’d come from, so onward Playmaker went to every location to return their souls.

The ocean’s floor, the Den City lookalike, the field of flowers—Playmaker brought them back and brought them home. With only one soul left, Playmaker swallowed hard and traversed through Mirror Link Vrains.

Ai, at his side, speaks candidly, “we’ve only got Revolver left!”

“Yeah,” Playmaker says fondly, the gusting of wind as he careens through the air not the only thing making his heart race faster in his chest.

As he slopes off the d-board and feels the crunch of Calluna under his feet, Playmaker can recall with devastating clarity the plot of flower bedding where Revolver had disintegrated into 1’s and 0’s, been carried on the wind like dandelion seeds. Playmaker moves cautious and careful, as though Revolver’s been _here_ all this time and he’s careful to wake him. Even without fantastic memory, there’s a skid mark in the dirt where Revolver once landed. There’s a line of discarded flowers that have not wilted and a patch of dirt in the shape of a man.

Kneeling down with all the delicacy of returning a mistakenly pilfered Tulip from the soil, Playmaker lowers the arm with his duel disk down and touches his fingers to the dirt.

All is silent save for the low frequency hum that permeates all of Link Vrains, only noticeable when it’s quiet enough. Flower petals descend and blow in from all around. It almost makes his nose itch.

“What’s wrong, Playmaker? Why are you hesitating?”

“Give me a second,” he says, not sure himself, though potentially he’s worried he won’t know what to say, only what he _wants_ to say, and not exactly what he _should_ say.

It isn’t in Playmaker to overthink things too much. Tapping the duel disk and opening up the data files, he peers inside to find Revolver’s file and swallows his throat dry at the strangeness he feels. No matter how many times it happens, he cannot get used to knowing that he’s here, inside of his computer, his Vrains account. Anyone could do anything with this data. It’s entirely too much power. It freaks him out.

He sends the data to the conduit, to the flower bed, the place of Revolver’s grave, and Playmaker watches the resurrection before his eyes: the boy like Isaac, whose father left him in the dark for days and nights to appease his God, comes back to life. In the field of flowers, Moriah is found and he has been laying here for all of his days, gazing up into the sun and waiting for night to come to the mountain.

It did, and so too did the light again.

From boot to helmet, Revolver is built out of cyber-blocks and cyber-tiles until he takes up space again—becomes something resembling a body made of matter and made of value. Playmaker’s hand nearly clips through him, having been flat against the dirt. Now it sits poised against Revolver’s chest.

The simulated heart beat rumbles through it. Revolver blinks his eyes, a flutter of licorice lashes kissing each of his cheeks, a rosier color as pink petals refract light against his visor. His head turns on his neck and his mouth hangs ajar—wonderstruck and his eyes glowing with something kinder. The heather surrounding makes something mollified out of him. Revolver scratches his white gloves into the brown dirt, and his hand comes away dirtied and appropriately alive.

Revolver sighs with triumph, eyes slipping shut.

“Playmaker, you did what I could not.”

“Revolver—”

“ _Revolver!_ ” Ai finally shouts, having kept his silence for as long as he could, even after having _promised_ Playmaker he would let them talk. “You’re back! I wanted to see you again so badly, now that I know that we’re friends!! Ohhh, I just _knew_ you liked me!”

“Hmph,” he huffs. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, Dark Ignis. I haven’t altogether decided what I think of you.”

“Awww, c’mon! Revolv—”

“I couldn’t have gotten nearly as far as I did without you,” Playmaker says, and Ai claps two pudgy hands around his face, shrinking down into the duel disk appropriately. “You and everyone else gave me the strength I needed.”

Smiling something tranquil and cloudy, Revolver readjusts the way his shoulder blades lay into the ground, watching the petals plummet down and around the virtual dreamscape. He says, “I feel as though I went to sleep and had the strangest dream and now I’m back here.”

Playmaker’s hand has not moved an inch. He keeps his arm steady so as not to twitch or caress, even if it is what he wants to do. Just knowing there’s a beat beneath his fingers makes his stomach turn warm, his chest light up, all the nerves in him turn noisy and vibrate a little.

“What did you dream?” Playmaker says.

Revolver folds his hands in a heap at his stomach, collecting his fingers between one another. Playmaker can’t take his eyes off the smile he wears—alleviated of pain, of distress. It’s a childish smile, one he remembers foggily. It tugs at the stitches that hold his Frankensteined heart together.

“I dreamt of my father,” he says, and Playmaker wonders if Revolver has grown sick by the way he laughs. “I dreamt I really _had_ gone to see him, like Lightning said, and he… well, he was angry with me.”

Eyebrows grooving down into a troubled stare, Playmaker asks, “angry?”

“Yeah,” Revolver insists. “I went out to play without telling him again. He’s always busy with work and the house gets dark and empty. I left to go to the playground and when I got back, he was mad. He told me he was worried about me, that he didn’t know what he would do if he lost me.

“I told him, I didn’t know what I would do if I lost him. He gave me a knowing smile, like he already knew, and rested his palm on the top of my head like he always had, and I woke up.”

When Revolver swivels his line of sight to meet his, Playmaker thinks he looks at peace, thinks he looks lighter and made of silky fiber-optics: soft and glowing and rare.

“How funny is that?” he asks.

“Yeah,” Playmaker agrees. “It’s strange.”

Peering up at the sky once more, Revolver lifts one hand to take Playmaker by his wrist, joining it on his breast.

“Lay down and watch the petals with me. You don’t have anywhere to be. The hero of Link Vrains… of the entire world can relax a while.”

Playmaker’s jaw tightens and his fingers curl up against Revolver’s body, bathed in the heat coiling around his wrist. His heart makes an awful shot at leaping from his throat. If he doesn’t say it now… if he doesn’t get it out now… 

“Ryoken,” he starts with. Revolver’s eyes snap to his with terrifying speed, and it is then that Playmaker’s sure he’s speaking to that same eight year old boy with his back to the Earth, his head in the clouds, his heart wide open and youth in his eyes—the very same who drowns in Balloon Flowers and may have come out colder, older, hardened by trauma but is the very same, unchanging, enduring and hungry for love.

“I knew when I found out who you were that you were someone special to me, the most important person in my life. You gave me hope when I could barely breathe, when I could barely think. You inspired me and I knew since I was six years old that I wanted to save you and bring you to where I am.”

Revolver trembles. “Pl-playmaker, what are you—”

“I knew since our duel at the top of the Tower of Hanoi that you were a good person and that life had been just as unkind to you as it had been to me. You grew up in a fold. Leaving it so easily wouldn’t have made sense. You wanted to honor the man who had been your only family. You held onto the only vestiges of what semblance of a life you had, but I knew I wanted to give you more.”

Pulling his hand up from Revolver’s chest, Playmaker links their fingers and Revolver’s face is unreadable, mystified disbelief.

“I knew that this was the road I wanted to take and that it would take you time to get there with me. I want to go into this new future with you and you’ll never, ever be alone again.”

Playmaker squeezes his fingers around tight, every feeling in his body shaking out of him until he’s shivering gentle into the dirt, something vulnerable and something powerful and Revolver has no choice but to squeeze back and either fight it or succumb to it.

In true Revolver fashion, he bites down and then says, “why?”

“First, we know each other on such a deep level. We have a deep connection that does not come often or easy. Second, we have helped each other to grow in new ways, and just as you saved me, I have saved you.

“Third, I love you, Ryoken Kogami. I want to lie in these flowers with you, and I want to stand beside you whenever I can, because I care about you and I don’t want to be away from you.”

Unceremoniously, Revolver sits up and shakes the hand caught up in his own.

“But why? After everything that I have done, you should hate me.” His voice quivers, doing something Playmaker has never heard it do: break. “I am… not a good person. My father—”

“You are not your father,” Playmaker says, “and he is proud of you.”

Revolver’s eyes go wide. “So am I.”

Revolver is quiet for a long time, the satin shapes of his lips moving timid beneath his top row of teeth before he can find a few words. His mouth opens slow, hesitantly and anxiously.

“Do you think it’s really over?” he asks. “I have been working tirelessly since I was a child to take care of my father, to raise myself, to raise an army, to destroy the Ignis, to destroy SOL Technologies. I have not rested, not until I could make up for my sin—the sin of snitching on my father and getting him turned into the corpse he was, hooked up to a computer.”

Eyes glittering over with relief, with only a soupçon of something glassy resembling tears in his eyes, Revolver’s grip goes rigid. His question must be rhetorical. He must want the one answer, the one that will save him, that he’s wanted to hear for so long.

“Can I stop now… Yusaku?”

Yusaku nods with conviction. Ryoken’s clambering into Yusaku’s arms before he can get the words out.

“You’re done, Ryoken. You can go home now.”

Ai pops out of the duel disk, wrapping his scrawny, rubbery arms around Revolver’s helmet.

“ _Okaeri! Revolver-chan!_ ”

**Author's Note:**

> you ever think about how ryoken was pseudo-raised by a bunch of his fathers scientists who had done experiments that abused children and he had 1 whole friend (who was a kid that self-admittedly claimed to have enjoyed the experiment) and thus after tattling on his dad ryoken probably felt immeasurable guilt about having been the one to send him away when apparently it wasnt that big of a deal cause spectre said it was fine and so he spent 10 years taking care of him and thinking that he had to atone for having done this horrible thing and not realizing until meeting playmaker that the incident had really tore apart his life, and further not realizing until meeting soulburner and then seeing jin how much the incident Really hurt people and thus his heart coming to change and his guilt transforming to also encompass feeling as though he has to make up for what his father as done as his son and that includes not only saving the world but destroying the ignis no matter what and for 10 fucking years he hasnt been allowed to stop or slow down or have more than 1 friend (freak scientists who worked with yr dad arent the same as friends) because since age eight hes had to play damage control for the ridiculous shit his father did and no matter what he cant hate him because thats his dad and he loved him and even if he didnt treat the best ryoken wanted his love and wanted to keep him alive and he just couldnt
> 
> well anyways yusaku is in love with him thanks bye. maybe its self indulgent to have a fic where he gets to be emotional and get a hug for once in his life but thems the breaks


End file.
